not writing

Although I see that I have gotten some posts made, I haven't been feeling very communicative lately. Just hermetic, holing up at home except when I have to go out for work.

That's not as often as for those with office jobs, since much of my work is at home, on the computer. What's been weighing over me is the need to evaluate a slew of Tolkien Studies submissions, especially the exceedingly detailed one by a speaker primarily of another language on an extremely recondite topic that I know I'm the only one of the editors who can tolerate as close an examination of as it needs. I spent about three weeks, off and on, going over it line by line, and then with a few new submissions coming in at the same time that turned out to be gloriously coherent and easy to read, I'm caught up.

And that's the least important part of my TS job. The rest of it I don't even want to think about at this point, although I have to.

In cataloging, the big upcoming job is on hold at the moment. That's setting up the LAN and creating a patron database, which will involve much discussion between me and my computer-tech colleague with the congregation staff and their tech guys. In the meantime we're dealing with smaller matters. Our ancient printer, the one we print spine and card labels to process the new books, broke while I was trying to print a large catch-up job to deal with a huge pile of accumulated acquisitions that had taken over the workroom.

Amazingly, we got the printer replaced in a jiffy. Having beaten off a suggestion that we get a big one with bells and whistles, I persuaded the person who ordered it to get an itty-bitty functional model, and amazingly this had arrived (after a stutter involving the New Year's holiday) and she got it installed before I arrived to use it. All I needed to do was designate it as the online printer for the cataloging program and we were off to the races. With others in the library at the same time we got the entire mammoth pile of accumulated books processed in one afternoon. That was a satisfying day.

I'm all caught up on concert reviewing, and I'm way behind on Mythcon, a job I felt was probably beyond me at this point even before I was talked into taking it. Let's put that aside also.

Also have undertaken some non-everyday errands at home, but leave that aside for now, until I get more of it done. Oh, one: having been fed, the cat now needs to be petted.